I just downloaded IE8 beta 1 and installed it. Thankfully it has the Emulate IE7 button which helps to render the pages as if its from IE7 as many pages are not fixed up to render the pages for IE8. This beta is aimed for the web developers and designers.
I checked LyteByte with IE8 and I found only one glitch that I have to fix. I suppose if the pages are working well with Firefox, Opera and IE7 then it is most likely to work with IE8 too. But even some big sites like AOL looks totally messed up with IE8. Hopefully this release should help everybody to fix their websites and blogs.
The two big things in IE8 are the Activities and Slices.
Google as the default search provider in IE8?
But before that, while setting up IE8 what surprised me was it asked for the settings for search provider and other settings and by default search provider was listed as Google and not Live search. I am not sure if it has taken all these setting from IE7 but anyway if they want they could have listed Live search in the express settings. Maybe Microsoft is trying to change its principles?
Check here in the picture below that Google is listed as the search provider in express settings
So about the new big thing in IE8 Activities and Slices:
About the Activities,
Activities give users ready access to the online services they care about most from any page they visit, and developers gain an easy way to extend the reach of their online services. It’s as simple as selecting text to get started with an Activity
To give few examples, you can stumble a page by just right clicking the page and lookup stumbleupon reviews, you can add a page to digg, search something regarding that, blog about the content, find the definition, share it with different media like Facebook, translate to the language you prefer, find the location in a map, etc. And all this happens within the page you are browsing. Since Activities are like add-in, one can get much more features in the future which would enhance the browsing experience.
About the Slices,
WebSlices enable you to see when updated content—such as the temperature, or an auction price—is available from your favorite websites. A WebSlice is a “piece” of a webpage that you can subscribe to. Once you have subscribed to the WebSlice, it appears as a link on the Favorites bar. When the WebSlice is updated, the link on the Favorites bar will appear with bold formatting. You can then click the link to see the updated content.
To give few example, you can view friend’s status from Facebook, Monitor ebay items, track the buzz items from Stumbleupon, get the news headlines, track the weather, and much more. Similar to Activities, new Slices can be coded to give new features.
IE8 has a new interface for managing add-ons.
Also the downloads in Internet Explorer 8 are checked by Microsoft Safety Filter before downloading. You can turn on or off this feature and by default its turned on.
There are lots of other new features, to try it out Download IE8
Activities looks like a cool feature. Am looking forward to test this one too.
Great sneak review here. This was the article I was looking for, like some kinda review, where every other blog was just posting the same repeated content with the same headline.
The first page I opened with IE 8 was the acid2 test page just to check whether it supports 100% web standards. Next my blog, to check whether my blog is totally standardized or not
.. .I have just one issue, rest everything seems good and ok. I also thought why MS gave google as an option other than live search. May be MS know even if they put live, people are gonna upgrade to google only 
… cheers .. and keep up the good work.
Even my blog also has few alignment issues, now the big thing would be to correct them.
My site was appearing messed up. Guess i will have to fix that too.
I can’t see myself bothering with this. I’ve long ago converted to firefox, so unless Microsoft came up with an amazingly better product I wouldn’t be going back to IE.
“…many pages are not fixed up to render the pages for IE8.”
So they aren’t following web standards and now changing their own standards? I though web page design was supposed to be standardized and then the browsers are made according to work with those standards…
@Mad_Hat, I guess all the webpages were designed earlier to render properly in IE7 which was not according to the standards and based on Microsoft’s words I assume, if we adjust the code to the standards it should work in IE8…